Saturday, September 7, 2013

Joseph Tame is probably the world's most well-recognized GPS runner. (GPS runner meaning he creates images out of his workouts' GPS coordinates.) He's definitely the most recognizable runner in his adopted hometown of Tokyo, where he can't hide his tallness or his Britishness. And he doesn't try to, either, opting for neon getups and wielding multiple iPhones on every run. For several years, he's livestreamed himself runnning the Tokyo Marathon with a show-stopping homemade contraption dubbed the iTame.

In 2011, soon after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, I flew out to meet him and we ran a ginormous heart around Tokyo, a runner's tribute to the city. (Check out the story published in Competitor Magazine!) Ginormous being about 50K, the biggest design he'd completed at that point.

Now Tame's outdone himself. To support his beloved city's Olympic bid, he plotted out and ran the Tokyo 2020 emblem, featuring 83 flower petals between 1.2 and 5 miles each for a grand total of about 240 miles. He finished the "running art" yesterday, and it's pretty freaking awesome. Check out Tame's account of the drawing here.

Monday, August 12, 2013

I was being eco-conscious. I'd slammed two mint chocolate Gus on the bike and didn't have anywhere to put the wrappers, so I shoved them under my shorts. Only when I finished Flagstaff's Mountain Man oly tri did I realize why I got so many weird looks on the run.

Note to self: When tucking gel wrappers into shorts, do not place them upside down!

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Some higher power really, really didn’t want me to run
Boston this year. First an Achilles injury struck me down, so my last
long run was an insufficient 2 hours 45 minutes completed eight weeks before the race. I hadn’t
run at all in seven weeks. But my doctor told me he thought I wouldn’t rupture
my Achilles if I did run Boston, I’d just set back my healing. That's all I needed to hear. I prepared for pain.

At the Expo

T-1 week until race
day. I go for a 2-hour bike ride and feel off. Sluggish. No energy. Two
days later I have a fever and can’t move or eat anything except soup made of
98% water, 2% noodles.

T-3 days until race
day. I go to the doctor because I'm not sure I'll be able to
get on the plane to Boston the next day. The doctor puts on a facemask before
entering the room, then does all he can to examine me without touching me too much, paranoid I have a late case of the flu. I do have a
fever. It’s 101. I don’t, thank goodness, have the flu. I get a Z-pack and an
inhaler.

T-2 days until race
day. I pray the three Z-pack pills I’ve already taken will destroy every
evil thing in my body, and, as an unintended but miraculous side effect, repair
my Achilles to their pre-Birkebeiner form. I still have a fever. I want to run.

At LAX, the Boston marathoners form a little circle in front
of our gate. You can tell who they are because they’re all wearing Boston
jackets, mostly from last year, but one guy had the balls to buy the new
Halloween themed 2012 jacket before
running the race. Also, they're all talking about Boston.

The runners are surprised to find out I’m participating.
When I breathe it sounds either like someone’s popping corn in my throat or slowly
opening a rusty door. What’s left of my voice is a gender-neutral smoker’s
rasp. Now would be a good time to prank call someone to say, “I’m watching
you.”

Karen, a best friend from college, picks coachubby and me up
from the airport in Boston. We are crashing at her place. When we walk 10
minutes to get ice cream that night, I realize I can’t walk and breathe at the
same time. Unless I’m eating ice cream. I contemplate how I’m going to supply
myself with ice cream throughout all 26.2 miles of what promises to be the
hottest Boston Marathon ever.

T-1 day until race
day. To discourage people like me who really, really don’t want to have to
qualify again and are therefore willing to destroy themselves to complete their
one Boston Marathon, the BAA has decided to allow deferrals to next year.
Perfectly rational, healthy racers might need medical attention on the course. People
like me who are undertrained and overheating without moving should not be
hogging the hot EMTs.

I thank
88-degrees for both being my favorite temperature, and, apparently, hot enough
to scare race organizers into letting me run next year without having to
qualify again. Clearly, none of them were raised in Phoenix.

Race day. Karen
and I drop coachubby off at the busses in Boston Common. I return to Karen’s
place and pass out. When I get up just in time to watch the race start on T.V.,
I put on exactly what I would’ve worn to run: hot pink compression socks,
rainbow colored tiny shorts, and a blue tank top. Sparkly nails complete the
ensemble. If I can’t run and must feel like crap, at least I will look like I
can run and feel awesome. I take two puffs of Albuterol but still have a hard
time walking the two miles to Mile 23.

We set up camp alongside the T. We cheer for wheelchair
racers, for the pro women, for the pro men. For that guy in the checkered spandex. We get text message alerts of coachubby’s
whereabouts so we’ll be ready to cheer when he runs by.

He never runs by. I get
a text from his cousin: Jimmy bonk? I don’t know, I write back. I
haven’t seen him. Maybe he’s fighting an EMT who’s trying to give him an IV for
heatstroke. He has a history of doing that.

I get a call. It’s coachubby. He’s at mile 24, where am I?
I’m at mile 23, I say. I clearly suck at spectating. Oh, I wanted to see you
guys, he says. I’m moving really slowly. You can probably catch me.

And so I run in my first Boston Marathon.

I take off down the course, cell phone in hand. People
applaud my pace, held for all of approximately 10 seconds. Cops don’t even
flinch when I run by. It’s exhilarating! I’m in the Boston Marathon! It’s the
first time I’ve run in seven weeks and I feel…awful. I duck under a rope and
back onto a sidewalk after about 20 seconds. I walk toward mile 24, sucking
air. Then the coughing attack starts. Tears jump out of my eye sockets, snot
dumps out of my nose. I can barely breathe. I spot a half-drunk water bottle in
a windowsill. I grab it without breaking stride and down it. I’m still
coughing. I sit on a curb next to two teenage boys guarding their family’s
coolers. One of them hands me a water. Then they whisper to each other. I tell
them I wasn’t running—that I was supposed to but couldn’t because of this, and made a motion to my snot and
tear-covered face.

I find coachubby by the family waiting area. He’s done. He
did it. He ran the hottest Boston Marathon in history, earning permanent marathon rockstar status. He survived my fever and
the sympathy non-training he did when I couldn’t run. He gives me a hug and
lets me eat half of the Hawaiian sweet rolls out of his post-race goody bag.

Ouch, he says. Yeah, I think. That pretty much sums it up. The last two months. The last week. This day: Ouch.

We begin plotting my debut at the 117th Boston Marathon, where I plan on running for more than 20 seconds. It will be glorious.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

It
all started with a walk. I walked about half a mile down the street with a friend from Japan who needed to experience a Wahoo’s burrito and
American Starbucks. My left heel was on fire. Well, this is strange, I thought.
I’d jogged maybe nine miles the day before, done a one-hour interval workout on
my trainer and jogged a few miles down the beach that morning. Those are not
weird workouts. But here I was, with my foot on fire, wondering what the hell
went wrong.

Oh
yeah, there was also the Birkie, a 54-kilometer (that’s 33.5 miles,
Americanos!) cross-country ski race held annually in Wisconsin. I had written about it for Outside, and decided I couldn’t give up the opportunity to see real-life
people who talk like Frances McDormand in Fargo. I had never ever cross-country
skied before, nor had I worked out much in the last five months. A fitness-crushing
bout with mono (diagnosed post-mono) made it almost impossible for me to
move for more than 20 minutes without being overcome by sleepiness. And that’s
when I could actually get out of bed.

Maybe
two weeks before the Birkie, I started feeling better. I’d been running through
the mono anyway, because I had no idea what was going on, only that I didn’t
like it or agree with my body’s decision to play Sleeping Beauty. The week
before the Birkie, I covered a nice hilly 2 hour 45 minute loop in the Santa
Monica mountains. I declared myself good enough for America’s biggest XC ski
race. I was an idiot.

Coachubby and I hoped the Birkie
would take us 6 hours. After the first 5K, we realized we were off. We crossed
the finish line of the hilly course, after several faceplants, in 7 hours and
20 minutes. (Story to come.)

Besides
a mildly sprained wrist that I’ll attribute to faceplant #2, I seemed to make
it out of the event unscathed. But the stress from 7.5 hours of cross country
skiing on flat feet took its toll on my Achilles tendons, making them ticking
time bombs ready to explode under any additional pressure. The bike
interval/beach jog did them in.

Now
it’s less than five weeks before the Boston Marathon, an event I qualified for
at the Rock N Roll San Diego marathon last June. I’d hoped I could best my
qualifying time of 3:33 by at least a minute. (I’d have hoped for more, but the
mono made me scale back expectations long ago.) Now I just hope I can run by
then.

After
an entirely injury free build up to Ultraman Canada last year (story still to come. Sorry!), and a subsequently
injury-free race (the only thing that got injured, apparently, was my immune
system), it’s a frustrating place to be. After more than a decade of competing
in sports, I look back and realize that very often, I am still an idiot. I like
to go long and hard, and have a difficult time telling when my body is telling
me not to because it’s literally going to break, or when it’s telling me not to
because it’s being a wuss.

So
if you see me spinning slowly down LA’s flat Strand, please don’t challenge me
to a race, because my mind will tear my Achilles’ apart to hang onto your wheel.
Especially if we’re on a Strava segment.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Why triathlon is booming, why you should do it, and how to get started. Outside Magazine's comprehensive guide, complete with celebrity endorsements, training plans, and a triathlon in Aspen. (Written by yours truly!) Find it in the February issue, on newsstands now. Look for the incredibly hot hurdler Lolo Jones on the cover. Also online here: